A blog post from PhD student Charlotte Zealley
Arguably, the biggest challenge of a PhD is its solitary nature. Only I can write my thesis, and only I will lie awake at night fretting over how to wrangle my research into a coherent narrative. On the face of it there isn’t much space or time for collaboration within the traditional PhD model.
However, Collaborative PhDs do exist and while, yes, it’s still only the student doing the writing, they provide an opportunity to work with non-academic partners from a very early stage in the project.
I began a Collaborative Studentship funded by the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science in September 2020 and write from the perspective of being two years into the project.
My particular collaborative partner is a third sector organisation, though the SGSSS is open to collaborations with private sector and public sector organisations too. Around 14 such studentships are awarded each year across Scotland, with partner organisations contributing in cash or kind towards funding the studentship.
In this blog post, I share some insights about what they are and how they can provide a more participatory approach to PhD research.
How collaborative PhDs work
My collaborative partner was involved in designing my PhD topic with my supervisors even before I joined the project, and their input has continued to shape the research over the past couple of years.
While a number of factors both academic and pragmatic have helped me refine my PhD topic, it was in part through informative early conversations with my partner organisation that I decided to focus on third sector organisations in my research. The research topic therefore narrowed from a broad interest in the experiences of NEET 16-25 year olds to a specific focus on the employability support this group receive from third sector organisations.
As a result, my partner organisation became both a collaborative partner in my research and a subject of that research.
Participatory research at a PhD level
A key benefit to Collaborative Studentships is that they support a form of participatory research at a PhD level. Participatory research can be time-consuming as it often necessitates building a relationship with participants before data collection begins.
Within the relatively tight timeframes of a PhD this can be challenging to achieve, and the Collaborative Studentship model can go some way to lowering this barrier by helping to establish a collaborative relationship from the very start of the project.
For example, I have been meeting with and getting to know people who are now my research participants since the first month of my PhD.
The challenges of a collaborative PhD
There are nonetheless challenges to this kind of PhD, too. Collaboration brings with it further responsibilities to handle as a PhD student. While my collaborative partner has been very supportive, I nonetheless feel the need to juggle between providing research that is academically rigorous and fills a gap in the academic literature, with research that is of practical interest (or even utility!) to a non-academic partner.
I’ve also had concerns about how to protect the anonymity and confidentiality of my research participants when I share my research findings back with my partner organisation.
Reflections
From this vantage point in the project I can reflect, however, that the collaborative studentship is developing my skills in managing relationships with non-academic partners, and making me to think carefully about what good academic research should do and who it should be for.
In this way, it is pushing me to develop as a researcher and help me to produce meaningful research.
I’m genuinely excited at the opportunity to share and discuss my research findings back with my collaborative partner, and hope that having the framework of the Collaborative Studentship will support me to prioritise this knowledge exchange.
If you are thinking about a Collaborative Studentship and have further questions about this type of PhD – or are a fellow Collaborative PhD student and would like to swap stories – please get in touch!
